The Japanese government decided Wednesday to make it mandatory from next April to install safety devices in approximately 44,000 buses used by kindergartens and child care facilities nationwide after a toddler was left alone inside a kindergarten bus and died from heatstroke.
Any kindergarten or child care facility found in violation of the new mandate will be ordered to suspend operations, and manuals for staff will be written to ensure children are safely supervised.
To encourage prompt implementation, the government aims to subsidize 90 percent of the cost of installing safety devices, up to a maximum of 200,000 yen ($1,400) per bus. Funding for the subsidies will come from a new supplementary budget the government is planning to submit to parliament later this year.
For a one-year period, after the safety device is mandated, the government will allow facilities to take alternative measures as a stop-gap, such as attaching inspection charts to buses.
The decision, made at a meeting of relevant ministries and agencies, comes in response to the death of a 3-year-old girl in Shizuoka Prefecture last month, who succumbed to heatstroke after being left inside a kindergarten van for several hours.
"We will urge facilities to have safety systems installed by the end of next June" to avoid unnecessary delays, Masanobu Ogura, minister in charge of policies related to children, said at the meeting.
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